Hommel, Susanne Dorothea; (2018) Assessing the Quality of the Parent-Infant Relationship: Reliability and Validity of the Parent-Infant Relational Assessment Tool (PIRAT) Global Scales. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The PIRAT Global Scales (Broughton, Hommel & the Parent-Infant Project, 2016) have been manualised to provide a global assessment of the infant-parent and parent-infant relationship up to the age of 2 years. They offer a shared language and understanding among health professionals from various disciplines as to what constitutes risk and resilience. Preliminary research into inter-rater reliability showed that PIRAT Global Scales provide a reliable assessment of the overall relational quality and can be used as a screening tool to identify infants at risk (Hommel, Broughton, & Target, 2014, 2015, 2016). The study evaluates PIRAT Global Scales’ psychometric properties based on the standardised 3.5 day reliability training. Further research evaluates PIRAT Global Scales’ reliability and validity on a larger sample of mother-infant dyads. The PIRAT Global Scales reliability and validity study uses data from a Parent-Infant Psychotherapy Randomized Controlled Trial. The research establishes PIRAT Global Scales’ reliability, in particular internal consistency and inter-rater reliability. Furthermore, the study establishes PIRAT Global Scales’ validity compared to a number of widely used, well-validated measures of parent-infant interaction, such as the Emotional Availability Scales (EAS; Biringen, 2000), the Coding Interactive Behavior (CIB; Feldman, 1998) and the CARE-Index (Crittenden, 2001) and indicators of risk, such as ‘Disorganized Attachment’ (Main & Solomon, 1986, 1990), low ‘Reflective functioning on the Parent Development Interview’ (PDI-R; Slade, Aber, Berger, Bresgi, & Kaplan, 2003) and high ‘Parental Stress’ assessed by the Parenting Stress Index – Short Form (PSI-SF; Abidin, 1995). PIRAT Global Scales are shown to be reliable and valid, and therefore enable the user to set their observations within a reliable and validated assessment framework of the parent-infant relationship. Implications of the research findings for the clinical use of PIRAT Global Scales in a variety of clinical settings and for future research will be discussed.

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